For Sale: Famed Nobel Medal for Discovery of DNA Structure

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Sixty years after the discovery of DNA's spiraling, ladder-like
structure first hinted at the mechanism by which life copies
itself, one of the Nobel Prize medals honoring this achievement
is up for sale.

Three men who played crucial roles in deciphering DNA's
double helix in 1953 later received the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The family of one of
those men, Francis Crick, plans to sell his medal, the
accompanying diploma and other items at auction with a portion of
the proceeds set to benefit research institutions in the United
States and the United Kingdom.

"It had been tucked away for so long," said Kindra Crick, Francis
Crick's 36-year-old granddaughter, of the medal. "We really were
interested in finding someone who could look after it, and
possibly put it on display so it could inspire the next
generation of scientists." Francis Crick passed away
in 2004 at the age of 88.

The value of Nobel gold

There is little precedent for this sale. Nobel medals appear to
have changed hands publicly in only a couple of instances. This
particular medal, like others made before 1980, is struck in
23-carat gold, and recognizes a particularly high-profile
accomplishment in biology, one fundamental to modern
genetics.

The auction house handling the sale, Heritage Auctions, has
valued the medal and diploma at $500,000, which is "an educated
guestimate," said Sandra Palomino, Heritage Auctions' director of
historical manuscripts. Estimates by Heritage's in-house coin
experts went as high as $5 million, Palomino said. [ See
Photos of Crick's Medal & Other Auction Items ]

The April auction will also include Crick's award check with his
endorsement on the back, the scientist's lab coat, his gardening
logs, nautical journals and books. Separately, the family hopes
to sell a letter Crick wrote in 1953 to his then-12-year-old son
Michael, who is Kindra's father, describing the discovery's
meaning. The auction house Christies, which Kindra Crick said is
handling the sale, declined to confirm plans to sell this letter.

The medal was not displayed much within Crick's family. Kindra
remembers that the Nobel, which she has yet to see herself, was
locked in a room with her grandfather's other awards and other
family heirlooms after he moved to California at the age of 60.
After the scientist's wife, Odile, passed away in 2007, the medal
was sequestered in a safe deposit box. Crick's children,
including Kindra's father, Michael, attended the award ceremony
in 1962, but saw almost nothing of the medal afterward.

Kindra plans to get a look at the medal before the auction.

"My grandfather was not the type of personality to show off," she
said. "His conversation tended to be on what's next as opposed to
reminiscing about the past … I guess he always thought there was
more to come."

Crick's family hopes to see the medal displayed publicly after
its sale; however, Kindra Crick acknowledged that a public
auction offered no guarantee a buyer would display the award. But
she is optimistic, saying those individuals or institutions with
enough interest in science to bid on the medal are also likely to
display it publicly. [ Creative
Genius: The World's Greatest Minds ]

Crick's family and Heritage Auctions plan to donate a portion of
the proceeds from the sale of the medal and the other items to
The Francis Crick Institute, a medical research institute
scheduled to open in London in 2015. A portion of the proceeds
from the sale of the letter will go to benefit the Salk Institute
in California, where Francis Crick studied
consciousness later in his career, Kindra said.

Sixty years later

On Feb. 28, 1953, according to legend, Crick and his colleague
James Watson announced that they had discovered the "secret of
life" in a pub frequented by other Cambridge University
scientists.

This followed Watson's realization that the molecular bonds
between the two types of base pairs in DNA — adenine with thymine
and cytosine with guanine — were identical in shape, suggesting a
double helix with complementary halves, Watson recounts in "The
Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix" (Simon & Schuster,
2012).

This discovery was the result of a combination of approaches;
Watson and Crick built models, trying to determine how the
molecules known to make up DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) fit
together. Meanwhile, two of their colleagues, Maurice Wilkins and
Rosalind Franklin, created images by bouncing X-rays off DNA
crystals.

In the years prior to this discovery, scientists knew of the
existence of DNA (a type of molecule known as a nucleic acid),
but not what it looked like or its true function. They also knew
genes carried traits from generation to generation, but many
scientists believed genes to be made of proteins, said Jan
Witkowski, executive director of the Banbury Center at Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

The discovery of the structure of DNA was key to understanding
the molecule's function as the code for genes. Watson and Crick
understood this, but when they described their discovery in a
paper in the journal Nature in April 1953, they wrote coyly of
the implications: "It has not escaped our notice that the
specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a
possible copying mechanism for genetic material." [ Code
of Life: Photos of DNA Structures ]

However, in the letter to 12-year-old Michael, dated March 19,
1953, Crick drew a diagram spelling out the scientists' theory of
how DNA replicated: the double helix and its base-pair rungs
separated to create templates for new strands.

"In other words, we think we have found the basic copying
mechanism by which life comes from life," Crick wrote to his son.
The scientists signed the letter, which appears in "The Annotated
and Illustrated Double Helix," "lots of love, Daddy."

A geneticist himself, Witkowski lists the discovery of the
structure of DNA as one of the three most pivotal accomplishments
in biology, along with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by
natural selection and Gregor
Mendel's principles of inheritance.

"Of course, it wasn't so much what each discovery was in itself,
but what avenues it opened up and what it led on to," said
Witkowski, who with Alexander Gann, edited the "Annotated and
Illustrated Double Helix."